Changpeng Zhao has some scores to settle in 'Freedom of Money'

By TheStreet Roundtable

about 2 hours ago

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There is something about solitary confinement.

It strips a person down to one essential question: what do you do with yourself when there is nothing left to do?

But Changpeng “CZ” Zhao knew what to do. He wrote a book.

In 2024, while serving four months at a federal prison, the Binance founder was spending 15 minutes every day on a prison computer, drafting the first version of his book “Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance.”

Although it is called a memoir, it is also a way for CZ to settle some serious scores with prosecutors, journalists, a former employer, the Democrats-ruled White House, some crypto peers and the version of himself that the headlines created.

Humble beginnings

Zhao doesn't jump into score settling as soon as you open the book. In fact, in the first couple of chapters, Zhao writes about his humble background.

Through Zhao's lens, I saw the story of an immigrant family without any self-pity.

A father robbed of a decade by the Cultural Revolution in China, quietly determined to take it back through education, first for himself, then for his children.

A mother who has to pick up a sewing job because of her broken English, despite being a math and history teacher in her own country.

A family moving to a country whose language they barely spoke, with no safety net and no guarantee, but a hope to have a better life.

More than telling the reader about his background, it seems as if Zhao is reminding himself where he came from.

Scores to settle

The shift of tone is subtle and before you realize it, you are listening to Zhao’ version of some important instances from his career.

It starts right around the time Star Xu enters the picture.

Xu, the founder of OKX (formerly OKCoin), where Zhao briefly worked as CTO in 2014, has been mentioned about eleven times across the memoir.

Zhao is careful to describe his departure from OKcoin only as the result of "cultural and value differences," declining to elaborate.

But the restraint is not for long. He gives a detailed retelling of a very public feud: the allegations of forged contracts, a Reddit post that went slightly overboard, personal attacks, and the eventual departure of the then-marketing head of OKCoin, Yi He, who later became Binance's CEO and Zhao's lifetime partner.

Zhao, at times, sounds like a person getting dragged into unnecessary conflicts he doesn't start, but gets forced to defend his name in public.

Zhao’s retelling of the story did not go unnoticed by Xu. Right after the book was released, Xu publicly accused Zhao of lying and fabricating facts.

The prosecution, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Gary Gensler and the overall Biden administration all get similar treatment and in considerably more pages from Zhao.

He describes the then-U.S. government's case against him as a politically motivated campaign against the crypto industry. He calls it a "common pattern by prosecutors” of tipping off journalists for negative coverage, then using the resulting stories to open investigations.

To date, he is still the only person in crypto to have served federal prison time for Bank Secrecy Act violations.

Journalists fare no better than prosecutors. Zhao returns repeatedly to what he sees as a pattern of sensationalistic coverage. He has a lot to blame on planted stories, distorted narratives, reputations traded for clicks and real estate, which resulted in Binance’s damage in those days.

The most poignant part of the story

The book's most surprising and honest part is the account of prison itself. Here, there is no score-settling.

Zhao describes the social architecture of incarceration, the "cars" (a term for subgroups within the prison), and the bureaucratic confusion in length. The description will bring out your sympathy for the long-timers who have no choice but to make it their world. For those serving short sentences, he writes, you endure. For others, it is simply life.

For example, he describes in length how he felt when he was shifted from prison to house arrest, only to be hauled back by ICE agents with cuffs on his hands and ankles.

So close to freedom, yet so far.

For CZ, these tactics were like mind games. It was not the actual prison that broke him, but the psychological effect such episodes left.

It is one of the few passages where Zhao seems less interested in his own vindication than in something larger.

The fifteen-minute-a-day writing sessions in a text messaging tool gave him the much-needed valve to let go of his emotions.

Many times in the book, you might see overlaps and repetitions. You might feel like telling “CZ, you just talked about it in the last chapter.”

But this is what happens when you are working on a computer system that won't let you copy and paste. You have just fifteen minutes to dump everything, hit send, and then wait for another hour in line for your turn to use the system again.

“By the time I got back on, I would have lost my train of thought, and would just start on a completely different topic.”

So, if you see some overlaps, just bear with it.

Throughout the memoir, Zhao uses “protect your users” as a mantra behind every step he ever took: from rapid responses to security alerts, to refusals to list short-term ICO cash grabs.

As he puts it,

“Protect your users, and you will be successful (and rich) beyond your wildest dreams.”

The memoir closes with 72 principles, inspired by Ray Dalio's famous work “Principles.”

It is a fittingly ambitious ending for a man who has accepted the fact that, after everything, he did his best.

“I never aimed to be 'the best' at anything; I just aimed to do 'my best' in what I believed mattered.”

U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned him in October 2025 and Binance continues to operate. By most external measures, Changpeng Zhao has landed on his feet.

The verdict

★★★★☆4 out of 5 — Recommended

Freedom of Money is not about what it argues or retells from a different perspective, but in what Zhao has made peace with. The tag of a felon will stay with him forever, but the book is his way of reminding us of the journey he crossed to reach here.